It’s not a canard. We have a shitty mess of gun laws in this country - and the gun lobby has a lot of power. Anyone that even asks the question - or makes a public stand - about needing to revisit in a serious manner what we’re doing to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of the wrong people ultimately gets marginalized and ignored at best.
Just doing a Wiki look up of the state by state differences in gun laws is shocking.
And it’s not irrelevent to look at the fact that we’re the only civilized country in the world that has this level of gun violence.
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“Fascinating theory but let’s try literally every other possible approach first!”
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I assume that the USA is most of Other
First of all, the second amendment only gets to claim credit for things the second amendment facilitated. It didn’t help with the French revolution or even the American revolution. Lot’s of terrible public policy can be made by simplifying historical events. Guns were a useful tool for overthrowing some tyrannical leaders. You can’t generalize from that and say that permissive guns laws make it harder for tyranny to take root.
If a tyrannical government takes hold in the near future in America it will likely have the backing of the majority of American gun owners. Those AR-15s will be in the hands of the brownshirts.
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Sounds like the name of someone you might meet at an ICP gathering.
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I should make it clear that I am not arguing against trying gun control, here, and I am not really interested in protecting all or even most gun rights. Sure, let’s make assault weaponry less available.
My contention is that this is not about guns; this is an American sickness that will continue past that point; after the guns go away it will be bombs, or trucks, or something, because the disease that infects us is not merely the presence of guns.
There is another group of troubled young men that is acting out violently in the world, centering around outsiders attracted to groups like ISIS. We don’t group this weird, disaffected violence with school shootings because the people involved seem superficially different to us. But the existence of this other set of violence - which often involves guns, but often does not - suggests that what we’re seeing in schools can assume many forms.
I merely suggest that what this country needs, desperately, is to fix its soul-sickness, not just to remove the instruments of our self-harm. To this end, a discussion about guns is a canard; it does not address what is more deeply wrong with us.
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Fair enough. But I don’t think that’s relevant to the point I was making, which was that he was determined to be justified in shooting the cops.
And if gun ownership was an effective way to keep police violence in check then we’d have the lowest rate of police violence in the developed world instead of the highest.
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I’m not sure there’s evidence of causality there, that’s the trouble with matters like this. One could point to anything bad in society and say “gun ownership isn’t stopping that”.
But if you’re implying causality, does that mean that reducing gun ownership will reduce police violence? Because the examples I’ve seen, like the handgun ban in DC, don’t seem to confirm that. The main trend associated with the handgun ban is more young black men in jail for firearms violations, not fewer murders by police.
Now, if we’re talking about reducing gun ownership by police, then I could believe there’d be a connection there.
I grant your general point, but nevertheless, less access to guns simply would mean less death.
As for the issues you mention, I remember way back when Michael Moore was talking about America’s violent soul in Bowling for Columbine. I agree that such deeper issues need addressing, but I can’t imagine how ordinary people can work on them much. People protesting with signs that say “Cure our violent soul!”? Puhleeze.
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I believe reducing private gun ownership is a necessary prerequisite for disarming the police. (You can’t say “private citizens can carry but cops can’t.”)
I also believe that cops wouldn’t be able to get away with as many unjustified shootings if they couldn’t use “I thought he had a gun” as a plausible excuse. You don’t see cops saying “I thought he had a grenade” to justify deadly force because it’s extremely rare for a private citizen to get their hands on a grenade. Not so for guns.
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And we’re not even just talking about bad faith and cover-ups. Like you said, cops don’t mistake cells phones for grenades because they aren’t thinking about grenades. When every American cop walks into every situation they face looking for guns because they always have to worry about guns, of course they are going to see guns where there are none. And of course they are going to be more likely to see those guns in the hands of people they are already prejudiced against.
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Ordinary people CAN work on them, by building a more supportive society, by fighting for each other, etc. If disaffected individuals see a world of caring and solidarity, instead of one that treats them as expendable but lies and tells them they are valued, their sickness might be healed. I think this goes deep - it means challenging capitalism, inequality, corruption in government, stagnation, political disenfranchisement, etc. All of this is stuff ordinary people are capable of fighting, and have organized to fight in the past, in times of greater hope.
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So you’re saying, in the meantime let’s support stiffer gun control laws?
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See, this is the kind of thing that leaves me thinking that gun control advocates just don’t get it. Eric Garner was choked to death on camera for resisting the police. Anthony Hill was gunned down for running toward police while fully naked. If you think that police violence can be solved by individually addressing each possible bullshit excuse cops have for committing murder, you will end us in a society where we cannot wear hoodies and buy skittles. Because anything which could possibly be interpreted as the hint of a threat will be used by cops as justification for murder.
I’m sure this sounds reasonable from a distance. But asking people who are under immediate threat from law enforcement to give up a self-defense resource, in the hopes that later on this could make it more politically palatable to disarm the cops too…surely you can see how this comes across?
To make a pretty unfounded guess, I imagine that actually you just don’t believe that widespread gun ownership prevents police abuse. You believe that things like laws and policies and oversight boards prevent police abuse. I also guess that this is because you haven’t dealt much with the immediate prospect of police violence in your community and your own life, but have instead considered both gun control and police violence as abstract political questions. I could be wrong, though.
I didn’t say reducing the number of guns would “solve” police violence, I said it would reduce it. And since you are the one who saw fit to bring up Trayvon Martin’s murder I would point out that Martin would be alive today if private citizen George Zimmerman hadn’t been carrying a gun.
Yes, I believe that. In no small part because there is no correlation between “higher rates of gun ownership” and “lower rates of police abuse.” If anything the opposite is true. When you suggest that disarming the public would create an even more violent police state, you ignore the precedent set by literally every one of our peer nations.
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I think anyone who thinks that widespread gun ownership prevents police abuse needs to come up with some startling proof of that. America has widespread gun ownership and absolutely staggering levels of homicide by police. It’s one thing to say, “That doesn’t prove causation” but it’s another thing to argue that causation flows in the opposite direction and somehow every developed country is an outlier.
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If this is what you want to fight for, go for it. But given the amount of partisan crap invested in this, I think you’re just going to end up fighting a battle for the Democratic Party, not the health of America. But I am a political radical who does not believe in Democrats or incremental change. Continually training our efforts towards narrow, less-meaningful political victories is how we manage to never talk about all of the deep-seated problems in America.
You don’t have to be a Democrat to support reasonable gun laws, it’s just that they are the only ones who have shown any willingness to do so over the last generation. The Republicans (or any other party) are invited to get on that bandwagon at any time.
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It’s true. Very many people killed by a gun would not probably not have been killed if the killer hadn’t had a gun. It’s really sad that those people were killed, and I wish it hadn’t happened.
I do respect the impulse to take lessons from other societies, but there are very very many differences between American society and others. To pick one policy difference and decide that this is the key determining factor is kinda cargo cult-y, and honestly seems like motivated reasoning. For example, I could cite the difference between protection of free speech in the US vs. our “peer nations”, and claim that this is the key factor driving the difference in murders. In fact, many conservatives try to do exactly that, and it’s just as arbitrary.
I can’t prove my point, but you cannot prove yours either. The common response is an appeal to common sense, which says “Gun used in murder. If no gun, no murder. It just makes sense!” But I think this “common sense” is more of an anti-intellectual slogan, not an inherently obvious truth. It is manufactured by politicians for purposes of rallying voters. I could just as easily say “Poverty causes murder. If no poverty, no murder. It just makes sense!” Only difference is that my common sense isn’t played on repeat every time someone is killed.
All I can speak to on the question of proof is my own experiences, which is that when I see cops decide whether to abuse folks in my neighborhood, they are always performing a calculus of safety. If they think they could be hurt or killed, they often decline to act, or wait for backup, or try to get a warrant. I have personally seen situations where the existence of a crowd of people (inherent subtext: a crowd of people, any of whom who might be armed) is enough to dissuade a cop from abusing someone, or to stop mid-abuse. I have seen situations where a resident doesn’t want to let the police into their home, and the possibility that the resident could be armed means the police have to involve their supervisors rather than barging in. In short, sometimes nothing is restraining a cop other than concern for his own safety.
The existence - or possibility of - guns doesn’t magically solve these situations, but it does play a role. These situations would absolutely have gone down worse if civilians were known to be disarmed. Because I have seen this directly it seems like common sense to me, and makes me suspicious of any position which doesn’t recognize this reality.
